The singular subversive who defied cloning

Brian Clough: Icon and iconoclast

For anyone not acquainted with the man or his works, the high tonnage of appreciation for Brian Clough since his death last Monday would have been proof enough of the impact he made on football.

For anyone not acquainted with the man or his works, the high tonnage of appreciation for Brian Clough since his death last Monday would have been proof enough of the impact he made on football. You would need a tombstone the size of Nottingham to chisel all the epitaphs written about him; and that's only the favourable ones.

Today, at the City Ground where West Ham are the visitors, Forest fans will don replicas of the green jersey he wore almost constantly, in tribute to his reign that brought the club back-to-back European Cups and several other big trophies.

But that's personal. He lit up their lives in a way the rest of us would not be able fully to appreciate; apart, that is, from supporters of Derby County, for whom he had earlier performed a similar miracle of transformation. To the nation as a whole he leaves some fascinating memories, a number of assorted idiosyncrasies to be laughingly recounted and the lingering, wistful regret that he was never let loose on the national team.

But there is no lasting legacy, no managerial style that could have been handed down and no influence on the game that can still be discerned. Some of his contemporaries, such as Bill Shankly, Matt Busby, Jock Stein and Sir Alf Ramsey, managed to leave behind a telling shadow or two, but Clough displayed such singular characteristics that he defied cloning.

One of his playing protégés, Martin O'Neill, has gone on to perform very impressively as manager of Celtic and no doubt learned plenty from the more temperate aspects of Clough's style, but a chip off the old block he isn't.

Because Clough didn't come anywhere near conforming to any normal template of management, some dismiss him as an alchemist whose ability to turn base metal into gold had an amazing effect on two struggling clubs but would not have worked higher up the tree. After all, his attempt to impose his brash quirkiness on the established stars of Leeds in 1974 lasted the disastrously brief time of 44 days.

At that time in Clough's life I was a football reporter, and prominent among my memories is an interview I had with him just after he joined Forest in January 1975. Following his degrading experience at Leeds he was out of work for four months. Then Forest sacked Allan Brown just before they played Tottenham at home in the FA Cup third round. Forest earned a 1-1 draw and Clough was appointed a couple of days before the replay. He took the team away to the residential sports centre at Bisham Abbey near Maidenhead, from where they went to Spurs and gained a surprise 1-0 win.

So he was hardly unhappy when I turned up for my arranged interview the following morning. He showed me into a room and sat me in a solitary chair, with six or seven others arranged in a semi-circle around me. He left and returned with his backroom staff, who all sat staring at me as he said: "Right, fire away."

There is only one way to face up to intimidation and that is to attack, so I asked him if he thought he could last more than 44 days at Forest. His colleagues seemed just as interested in the answer as I was, and he responded in such a keen and loquacious way I hardly had to ask another question. He covered many subjects and was particularly eloquent about his dislike of club directors who, he said, put nothing into the game, sat in the best seats, drank the club scotch while the fans froze on the terraces, and travelled first-class everywhere and contributed absolutely sod all to the game. Jimmy Gordon, his loyal and long-serving trainer, said: "If he prints that we'll all be out of work again."

I didn't print it. I had more than enough material, so I saved those words for much later. I would love to hear what he would have made of present-day club directors pocketing vast sums for roughly the same output.

What impressed me was the strength with which he had recovered from the Leeds experience. He partly agreed that he should never have taken it on in the first place, but said that there were two major jobs going at the time, Leeds and Liverpool, where Bill Shankly's reign was ending. "I was unlucky enough to be offered the wrong one," he said. "If I had gone to Liverpool I would have died there. I would have become as close to that club as the paint on the walls."

Clough did not know then that he would take Forest on to win two European Cups, nor that under Shankly's successor, Bob Paisley, Liverpool would go one better and win three. Would Clough have achieved more than Paisley at Anfield? I doubt it, but what he did achieve at a club with far more limited means was unarguably a massive feat.

Could he have done the same today? Financial power has taken such a grip on the modern game it is difficult to contest the argument that he would not be able to perform any eccentric wonders with a lesser club, but I would not say that it would have been impossible for him to have shone in the present times.

For anyone saddened by his death there has been rich consolation in the past few days from the quality of the tributes he has been paid in print. But the most vivid reminder of the man he was came from a documentary made 35 years ago by the independent television company LWT.

It was a classic fly-on-the wall production that had an appealing essence not too regularly seen these days, because proper journalists had a hand in it. Ian Wooldridge was the narrator and interviewer and John Bromley was behind the scenes, as was the former athlete Adrian Metcalf. The programme covered Clough's days at Derby County between 1968-70, and was enterprisingly purchased by Channel Five and shown late on Thursday night.

Clough would have been 34 at the time, and what he had to say was frank and boundlessly creative and would have sounded like a breath of fresh air had he been saying it today.

He was bright and brave enough to have made his presence felt in any era. His problem was that he was subversive by nature and incapable of the diplomacy that was important then, but is far more so these days.

He was fortunate that he had an indulgent chairman in old Sam Longson at Derby, and that Forest were governed by a committee rather than a boardroom of interferers.

You would have needed armed guards on stand-by had he and Newcastle's present chairman, Freddy Shepherd, been at the same club. The comparison that has been made between the young Clough and Chelsea's new manager, Jose Mourinho, is far from ridiculous; it is the relationship between Clough and Roman Abramovich that is fascinating to contemplate.

As for the England job, it would be impossible to find a more direct opposite to Sven Goran Eriksson. How much of a handicap that would be depends on your point of view. He did not get close to being chosen to manage England because he had already signalled his unsuitability to exist easily among the establishment.

For him to have succeeded as England manager would have required less from him than from the officials of the Football Association who, sooner or later, would have had to suffer a grievous loss of dignity from his acid tongue. That it never came to pass is one of the regrets of his passing.